ARMSTRONG ALLAHMAGANI, Bauchi
Bauchi state government has discovered 89 doctors as ghost workers who have been on its payroll but have not been working.
The State Commissioner of Works, Abdulkadir Ibrahim disclosed this while speaking to Journalists at the Government House on the outcome of the State Executive Council meeting held on Wednesday.
He said the doctors were discovered to be ghost workers during the ongoing verification exercise of all civil servants in the state.
“Concerning the payroll, we are in a serious mess in Bauchi, the discoveries that we are making everyday. We have a cult that is holding Bauchi to ransom, it’s a cult. 89 doctors that are working somewhere, who were sponsored by the Bauchi state government, collecting salaries here and elsewhere.
“They are collecting salaries from Bauchi state and also collecting salaries elsewhere, they just sit down and get alert without working in Bauchi. As a result of this exercise we are doing now of cleaning the payroll system, that is how we are beginning to discover so many of these things,” he stated.
He added that: “And believe you me, what we are discovering are so terrible and horrible. We discovered one single person collecting salary from the local government, collecting salary from LEA, collecting salary from health care and collecting salary from Bauchi state.
“And with this system we are employing, when his BVN and his number were put there, his picture appeared there. If we don’t correct it, how would it be corrected?”
According to him, a team was sent to some states to see how they were sanitizing their civil service, saying that once a person is found to be involved in such criminal acts, he will be prosecuted, also lamenting that the situation is different in the state.
“In Bauchi, we have multiple people having the passport, they will promise you that at the end of the month, they will improve your salary from grade level 14 to grade level 15 and so be it, how can be allow this to continue?
“If you see these kind of things and the atrocities being committed there, you’ll be shocked. But we are determined to correct this, we’ll do it one day and our graduates roaming the streets without any work will have work to do,” he stated.
He said that “some of them that are working like a cult collecting that money every month,” will not relent pointing out that “for the past three to five months, that is what we are been battling with from such people that have formed themselves into a syndicate.”
Ibrahim, a former Head of Service in the state, said that the government discovered a bulk of money with fictitious account numbers, people that are not in existence but at the end of the month, money earmarked, about N20 million will be posted into those fictitious account numbers that are non-existent.
He further said: “They will hit the account and then bounce back and those people that are beneficiaries will cleverly and softly, take away this money. I was once the Head of the Civil service but I never knew the magnitude of the kind of atrocities being committed in our payroll system until I was privileged to be in a committee that is looking into these things.
“The earlier we correct this, the better, otherwise, as we move on, the state will come to a halt and nothing will move again, this is because these people are busy fighting. They will go left, right and center, they will go to the social media, media house and keep making noise.”
He lamented that the government sponsored some students to go and study medicine and placed them on level four so that when they finish university and do their housemanship, then they will be upgraded.
“But we have students that have even been dismissed from the university studying medicine but they are collecting salary from Bauchi state for the past 10 to 15 years.
“It is as a result of this exercise that we are extracting and removing them. For example, somebody is reading Sociology, he was admitted to study medicine because he was not able to meet up, he had to change course, but he refused to come forward so that the system will automatically remove him from the payroll,” he stated.
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